Bellringer

by J. Robert Janes

  The Lucky Strikes were not from a British Red Cross parcel, and were taken not from a packet, but from the silver, diamond-and-emerald-encrusted case Van Cleef & Arpels had crafted in the ’20s to go along with the diamond-and-emerald bracelet that went with the first of those rings.

  ‘Ah, bon, merci. My partner will be certain to return the favour with interest as soon as possible.’

  Hermann’s Walther P38 had all eight Parabellum cartridges in its box magazine and one up the spout.

  ‘We don’t steal things, Inspector.’

  How watchful she was. ‘Only the Americans do that?’

  ‘They’ve plenty now, yet they still torment us.’

  ‘And you’ve ways and means of finding out who the thief is?’

  ‘A magpie, that’s all we know for sure. Things are stolen for their colour or the temptation of it, the thrill, n’est-ce pas, le grand frisson.’

  L’orgasme, the great shudder. ‘And not for their use or need? A kleptomaniac?’

  ‘Call the slut what you will, but it’s still stealing. If you find her, remind her that Madame Chevreul keeps asking, and that soon Cérès will give us the answer even if you don’t.’

  Hermann was still standing up there with Nora Arnarson, who was confiding something to him. Just what that was, one couldn’t tell, but it must have been given with a certain desperation, for they faced each other and the girl had at last managed to free her hand.

  ‘Léa Monnier isn’t the ringleader of the British, Herr Kohler. She’s just head flunky.’

  As he came down the stairs and into the foyer, the others having left, Hermann was in high spirits. ‘Limehouse, Louis. The docks along the Thames in London couldn’t hold our Léa, and she came over here in 1914 as a truck driver in that other war but found love drove her. Married a Claude Monnier in the autumn of 1917 while he was on extended leave. Learned the language, had five kids, collected his medals and his pension—Verdun as usual.’

  Such naiveté always needed clarification. ‘While working her way up to becoming madame of the clandestin at 27 rue des Lombardes, mon vieux, to support Monnier in the style to which he had become accustomed. Sénégalais porters, coal sellers from the Auvergne, farmers from the Vendée, Orléans, Nantes, and other places. All as customers bearing ducklings, fresh-picked asparagus, young spring leeks, Charolais beef, sausage from Lyon and oysters from Concarneau. Good country people with a little time on their hands after the onion soup.’

  Les Halles after that war to end all wars, and with overblown memories of what it must have been like before this Occupation!

  There was a sigh.

  ‘But she had kept her passport,’ said Kohler. ‘How many of those British women did you know?’

  ‘None, but working with you has been good for me. Ah, your Walther P38, Inspector. Please see that better care is taken of it.’

  ‘Still got that Lebel six-shooter I made sure the Geheime Staatspolizei were good enough to let you carry?’

  ‘The Modèle d’ordonnance 1873?’

  ‘The one with the eleven-millimitre low-pressure, black-powder cartridges no one wants when things get tight because they’ve been stored for such a long time and might be damp.’

  ‘It’s where it ought to be. Silent until needed.’

  ‘Maybe you’d better let me have it and I’ll get the Kommandant to lock up the firepower.’

  ‘Don’t be crazy, not with Madame Monnier and her hatpins. Now, please be so good as to carry your own overboots. You might need them.’

  The first victim wasn’t easy to get at, for the elevator, in the farthest wing from the entrance of the Vittel-Palace, had been decommissioned like all the others in September of 1939, its cage left in the cellars at the bottom of the shaft.

  ‘Someone opened the gate on the third floor, Louis. The corridor lights were blinking on and off—another electrical problem for which the electrician from town was later brought in. Caroline Lacy had had a rough night and was out along the corridor trying to get her breath and light one of her cigarettes. Mary-Lynn Allan, from Sweet Briar, Virginia, was coming toward her and Caroline thought the girl might need a little help, but then there was a scream.’

  ‘Why help? I thought Caroline Lacy was the one who needed it?’

  ‘Mary-Lynn was unsteady on her feet. Drunk perhaps, on home brew.’

  ‘And Nora Arnarson, who divulged this information, where was she?’

  ‘On the stairs. She swears it.’

  ‘And also drunk?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Date?’

  ‘Saturday to Sunday, the thirteenth and fourteenth.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘About 0100 hours on the Sunday and the reason for that urgent call to summon us.’

  ‘And why was Nora on the stairs, Hermann, since she obviously hadn’t gone to help Caroline Lacy?’

  ‘She and Mary-Lynn had been to a séance in the Hôtel Grand.’

  ‘Madame Chevreul?’

  ‘How the hell did you know that?’

  ‘The Ouija board I found under Nora’s bed and the words of Madame Monnier, but for now it would take too long to discuss it. Find us a flashlight. This candle stub of mine won’t last.’

  ‘Ach, I’ll have to go out to the gate. No one here is allowed one.’

  ‘And when the lights go out, it’s pitch-dark. Ah, merde, Hermann, what have we got ourselves into?’

  ‘A problem, especially since the Kommandant who asked for us but has now been replaced must have given the two permission to be out late that night, as well as letting them keep such personal items as watches, rings, and bracelets.’

  With the cellars at close to freezing, only now were there touches of yellowish-green to copper-red discolouration, but the veins in the neck and on the backs of the hands, where marbling was present, were a dark purplish blue.

  St-Cyr looked up the shaft of the elevator’s well. Mary-Lynn Allan had fallen the four floors from that third storey, had instinctively grabbed at cables that were shamefully frayed, considering it had been a deluxe hotel when built in 1899 and partially renovated in 1931. The palms of both hands had been badly torn, the left cheek as well.

  She had then turned over and had plunged to land facedown with arms flung out atop the elevator between its two cables, the rest of her bent over the iron bars to which those same cables were bolted.

  Blood had drained. Within about twelve hours, postmortem hypostases had coalesced and made the face, ears, and neck livid in their lowermost parts. The eyes bulged, the mouth, teeth, forehead, and nose were broken, as were the arms, legs, ribs, and shoulders. Having emptied herself instantly, the rats had got at her.

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu, Mademoiselle Allan, Hermann had best not see you. Death has haunted him since his days in the Great War from which a prisoner-of-war camp saved him but allowed time to dwell on the matter. Outwardly he puts on a veritable show, but inwardly. . . It’s not just that the big shots of the Gestapo and SS will use this against him, a detective of theirs who no longer has the stomach for it, but though he would never admit it, he’s far too old for the Russian Front and has already lost his two young sons to that. Boys. . . They were only boys. Yet, still, it’s really just Hermann himself. We’ve been through so much, have constantly been in each other’s company and yet have survived while displeasing virtually everyone else. Those who stood to gain and those who hoped to, even those remotely connected who simply wished the status quo to continue.’

  The thighs were bare, the foetus absent, the placenta wrapped around the remains of the umbilical cord.

  As gently as he could, he covered her. ‘Two months, three, mademoiselle? Had you told anyone, the father perhaps? Was he a guard, one of the doctors. . . the electrician who comes from town? The dentist, or one of the camp’s officers?

  ‘And why, please, was that gate deliberately opened when it should have remained closed and locked?’

  The candle stub flickered in a down-draught that drew
the little flame to one side, threatening darkness. Several photos lay about—snapshots from home she’d been carrying, and also a beautifully carved cavalier, a knight from a chess set, the wood light-red to reddish-brown.

  ‘And hard, and moderately heavy, and very straight grained.’ It had fortunately tumbled to the far left front corner of the elevator’s roof, where it had remained clear of everything else.

  ‘Mary-Lynn Allan was twenty-seven years old, Louis. Two brothers in the service, the girl the youngest. Father Ed. . . ’

  ‘Killed during that other war?’

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu, how the hell did you. . . ’

  ‘The snapshots. An officer.’

  ‘Killed during the Meuse-Argonne advance of. . . ’

  ‘Hermann, I’m aware of the date. Twenty-six September, 1918. Fog got them. Buried tank tracks and other shot-up armour threw their compass bearings off, they failing to realize this until it was too late.’

  The poor bastards had been green and almost straight off the boat from home, but Louis, like most of the French, would still be thinking les Américains sont toujours merveilleux. ‘They’d not had any food for at least four days and little if any sleep, mon vieux. You know how it was. End of story. First Army, Thirty-Fifth Division under Major-General Traub.’

  ‘The east bank of the Aire River well to the northwest of here and of Verdun, Hermann.’

  ‘She couldn’t have known him, would only have been about two years old but wondering all her life.’

  The photos had been of the deceased father, the cavalier having belonged to him. ‘That why the séance with Madame Chevreul?’ asked St-Cyr.

  ‘For which she handed over a cheque for the princely sum of fifty dollars American.’

  This investigation was getting deeper and deeper. ‘Which bank?’

  ‘The Morgan.’

  ‘With headquarters in New York but a branch office in Paris, Hermann, the cheque negotiable after this war since Madame Chevreul could not possibly get there to cash it even though that bank is still open. Ah, merde. . . ’

  The candle had snuffed itself. ‘Two of the guards are bringing an extension cord,’ said Kohler. ‘They’ll lower a light to you.’

  ‘Why don’t they open the ground-floor gates?’

  ‘Ach, I didn’t think to tell them. The crowd, I guess.’

  ‘Then be so good as to clear all corridors and find our trapper. Pick up where I left off by asking if any of that datura has gone missing before.’

  ‘Missing. . . ?’ Did Louis want to warn everyone of it? ‘Was she drugged?’

  Good for Hermann. ‘At this point, it’s simply an alternative to the effects of alcohol. She’d have lost focus, been very unsteady on her feet. . . ’

  ‘Hallucinogenic?’

  They’d all be listening now, felt St-Cyr. ‘It’s just a thought.’

  ‘But don’t jump to conclusions, eh? And Madame Chevreul of the Hôtel Grand?’

  ‘Leave her for now. Let others tell her of our interest. Chevreul was the nineteenth-century Frenchman who popularized the use of a pendulum to induce hypnosis. She may have borrowed the name, which would imply study of the process, or simply have married someone related or totally unrelated.’

  The listeners would think about that too. ‘In addition to getting in touch with her father, Louis, Mary-Lynn Allan wanted to know where he was buried since he was one of the hundreds of thousands who were never found. Blown to bits probably, or simply left in the cesspool of a shell crater to eventually be covered.’

  A sigh would do no good. ‘Hermann, please do as I’ve asked. Since you’ve already been talking to Nora Arnarson, continue your conversation with her, then find out whatever else you can here.’

  ‘But leave the Hôtel Grand for later. A pendulum and two bodies.’

  ‘The theft of little things of no consequence.’

  They’d all know of that anyways. ‘A trapper, Louis, a bell ringer, and a flunky.’

  ‘And a chess piece, Hermann.’

  ‘Oh, that. The wood’s from a Kentucky Coffeetree. The father carved it when he was a teenager. The mother sent it over with the snapshots in a Red Cross parcel. That’s why the ex-Kommandant who asked for us but left without leaving any information readily agreed to the late-night visitation and attended it himself as a firm believer.’

  Ah, sacré nom de nom!

  Room 3–38 was far from happy, thought Kohler. The blue-eyed blonde whose cot was under the St. Olaf College pennant tried to light a cigarette but was so nervous, match and fag fell to her lap, scorching the grey tweed of a slender skirt.

  ‘Shit!’ she cried in English. ‘Don’t, Marni. I’m warning you.’

  That one, whose cot was next to the innermost wall and under the Marquette U. pennant, and who had helped herself without the chef’s permission to a cup of the rabbit broth, had been about to quench the fire.

  ‘Should I have let you torch your beaver?’ she yelled. ‘The préfet de police’s goatee, eh?’

  The police chief’s beard and prostitute talk, the insult not really meant but. . .

  ‘That’s it!’ cried the blonde. ‘I’m not living here a moment longer. I can’t stand the stench of that!’

  The rabbits, to which the trapper, Nora Arnarson, having flung a desperate look of censure at the green-eyed redhead with the mass of curls who’d helped herself to the broth, was now slicing peeled sow-thistle roots to be added to the pot.

  She dumped the lot in and began to slice the hell out of an onion, though how she had come by such a rarity was anyone’s guess unless on the black market.

  ‘I don’t know how you can kill things like that, Nora,’ started up the blonde again. ‘I really don’t. They’re God’s creatures.’

  ‘As was the pig from which the SPAM you eat must have come,’ came the retort from Nora.

  ‘At least I was spared the agony of having to watch the poor thing being skinned and butchered!’

  Shrill. . . ‘Jésus, merde alors, ladies. . . mesdames et mesdemoiselles, a moment. My English, it’s not enough. I’m not here to accuse any of you, why would I? My partner and I just need a little help.’

  ‘If you’re to stop another of us from being murdered—is that it, eh? Why don’t you just say it?’

  That had been Jill Faber, who slept end-to-end next to Becky Torrence, the blonde, and was sitting under the U. of Wisconsin pennant.

  ‘Are we all to be poisoned?’ wept Becky. ‘Those damned seeds, Inspector. If Nora’s right, each one contains at least a tenth of a milligram of the datura poison atropine. Ten to thirty seeds will make you very sick and hallucinating in hell; a hundred can kill you.’

  ‘And for all I know, they could already have been added to our supper,’ said the chef, to which the redhead with the broth added, ‘Nora, darling, you don’t really mean that.’

  ‘We all knew both of them, Inspector,’ countered Nora, dribbling diced onion into the pot. ‘I wasn’t the only one who was near Mary-Lynn the night she died.’

  Swiftly they made eye contact, but with it had they instantly come to a consensus on how best to deal with him? wondered Kohler.

  ‘Darling, you weren’t as drunk as she was,’ said Jill, who was in her late thirties and maybe ten years older than Becky, the youngest of them. Jill had dark grey eyes that could set off the whole of her if she would but let them and if things had been better.

  ‘I was drunker,’ said Nora. ‘Mon Dieu, I could hardly get up those stairs and kept telling her to wait for me.’

  ‘She was in a hurry, was she?’ asked Kohler.

  The others were now intently watching the trapper-cum-chef.

  ‘She said she was going to be sick, Inspector, and needed the vase de nuit.’

  The night vase, the chamber pot. ‘The one in Room 3–54?’

  He’d think the worst of her if he ever found out the truth, thought Nora, but something had best be said. ‘And the room right next to that elevator shaft we both had to pass.�
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  ‘People come and go at all times of the night, Inspector,’ quickly offered Jill, who flicked a glance past him to the redhead called Marni.

  ‘It’s the shit you Germans give us to eat,’ said Marni. ‘It gives us the trots.’

  ‘Black bread that’s more sour than green apples; sour cabbage, too, and potato soup that always seems to have lost its potatoes,’ said Jill.

  ‘But with the chance of a knuckle from a long-dead horse,’ offered Marni.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it! Please!’ cried Becky.

  The cigarette had fallen to the floor this time to roll under her cot.

  ‘Stay where you are. I’ll get it,’ said Nora.

  She brushed it off and held it out, fondly touched the blonde’s cheek and said, ‘Why not let me rub your back? You know it’ll help because it always does, then I’ll make you some chamomile. I’m sorry about the rabbits. I should have realized and waited until you’d gone out.’

  They weren’t just nervous, felt Kohler. They were worried about where each of them fitted into these killings, were tense as hell, and desperately tired of one another’s company and of the room.

  ‘It’s the winter, Inspector. It’s been getting to us,’ offered Jill with an apologetic shrug. She had straight black hair, a nice wide grin, certainly dimpled cheeks, and did look like she could be a lot of fun, but they’d had one death a week ago just along the corridor and yesterday another, taken from this very room.

  ‘First,’ he said, pointing at Nora, ‘tell me if any datura has gone missing before?’

  She had better not look at the others, thought Nora, had better just gaze levelly at him and shake her head.

  ‘OK, now you,’ he said to Jill. ‘Tell me about the girl who fell.’

  Herr Kohler was a little frightening after the celibacy of the past five months, thought Jill. She knew her nervousness stemmed from that as well as from everything else, but had he noticed it already? Was that why the others could see what she was thinking? If so, he would be bound to exploit it and then where would she be? ‘Sweet Briar’s essentially a girl’s college. You could say, I suppose, that Mary-Lynn had led a sheltered life, but then came Paris. Before it was closed and taken over when you people declared war on us in December of ’41, she worked as an interpreter and sales clerk at Brentano’s on the avenue de l’Opéra.’